The claimed invention is directed to a grooved wire. More particularly, the invention pertains to a method and device for manufacturing wire having an odd number of grooves.
Round wire has been produced for hundreds of years. Not only is round wire the easiest type of wire to manufacture, the symmetrical shape of round wire exhibits predictable, uniform properties in any direction when used to bear mechanical loads, carry electricity, and propagate telecommunication signals. Such properties include a wire's bending yield strength in response to a shear load.
The majority of the cost of manufacture of wire comes from the raw materials used to make the wire. As the cost of the raw materials rises, however, it is desirable to minimize manufacturing costs by creating wire which uses less material to form the wire without significantly compromising the desirable properties of the wire, such as bending yield strength.
Currently, there exist methods to make 4, 6, and 8-groove wire using identical rollers which create grooved sections of wire that are directly opposed to one another. It would be desirable, however, to create a wire configured in which the grooved edge is directly opposite to a protruding edge to enable the wire to resist a shear load applied to a grooved side of the wire using its non-grooved counterpart.